Final edits for A Daughter of No Nation are done, done, OMG done, and the book’s back at Tor. Soon there will be copy-edits to proof. Meanwhile, I’m finishing up a short story for License Expired and then moving into polishing up The Nature of a Pirate.

So… blogging will commence approximately six minutes after I can form a sentence more complex than “Dur dur dur.”

I do spend a shocking amount of time saying “Get off da counter!” as it happens. CinCin has an advanced degree in incorrigible and she loves loves loves to mooch.

If you would like to kickstart this process whereby I become communicative again (kickstart in the old fashioned sense of the word, and not the “Let’s raise money for a rockin’ awesome project!” sense, though if you want to throw money at me of course I’ll knit a pink net to catch it with), feel free to suggest some topics. I’m often at my most interesting when I’m talking about something I hadn’t realized you all wanted to know.

The second book picks up about six months after Sophie’s deportation from the Fleet at the end of CHS.

Will we ever see a map? (you knew I needed to ask that)…

Honestly, I don’t know. I have hopes that it’ll happen one day… but as you probably remember, there’s so much ocean on Stormwrack, and so little land, that any full map of the planet would look like a blue sphere with green pimples. Also, since I am completely incapable of drawing one, some assistance will be required. A better bet is getting maps of some of the great nations, one day: Sylvanna, for example, and Verdanii. I don’t think there’s going to be a map in this book, though.

What new characters are you most excited to introduce us to?

Hmmm, who’s the most exciting new character in the second novel? We do see a little more of Sweet, who has been promoted up from her bosun’s assistant position on Nightjar, and you meet Watts, a doctor they pick up en route in this second book. I think the most fun I had with characters you haven’t seen previously was probably with a certain monk on Issle Morta, who has some strongly held opinions about Garland Parrish’s life and career choices.

You also get a quick look at Sophie’s adoptive parents, Regina and Cornell Hansa.

Paul, thank you for the questions! And the floor’s still open, everyone–what else do you all want to know?

As many of you will have already seen on Facebook and elsewhere, Tor has revealed the finished cover for the hardcover edition of A Daughter of No Nation, which will be out this November. The illustration was done by Cynthia Sheppard, and shows Nightjar, with Sophie, sailing into the harbor at Lamentation, which is the main port on Issle Morta. (It’s not the capital, mind; I’ll have to take you all to Hell on some other occasion.)

That’s right, folks–Parrish is going home in this novel, at least for a quick hit-and-run visit!

I should be turning in the third Sophie Hansa novel, NATURE OF A PIRATE, to my editor at Tor quite soon. But first I have pages for the paperback edition of Child of a Hidden Sea to proofread; that will be out in June. What’s more, I’ve been putting a shine on a submission for this James Bond-themed bad boy of an antho, out soon from ChiDunnit.

If you have questions about the sequel, shout ‘em out. I won’t spoil, but teasing isn’t out of the question.

Clarkesworld, February 2014, containing “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” by Kelly Robson.

Clarkesworld Issue #101 is live, with stories by Nicola Griffith, Greg Van Eekhout, Gwendolyn Clare, Kristine Kathryn Rusch… and Kelly! Her story is called “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill,” it’s an absolutely bloodcurdling SF piece, and I hope you’ll all go read it immediately. (And also post glowing comments on the CW site while simultaneously tweeting it far and wide, and buying up Worldcon supporting memberships so you can nominate it for Hugos and her for the Campbell.)

Yes, I’m wildly partisan. So what? I may be superproud, but it’s an effing great story. You won’t be sorry you read it.

For those of you who live in Toronto who might like to hear Kelly read, and to bask in her deservedly infectious joy at her 2014-2015 writing achievements, she’ll be appearing at the ChiSeries Toronto readingon Feb. 19th, 8pm at the ROUND Venue at 152A Augusta Avenue in the Kensington Market.

Like this:

Writing is, to a great degree, learned through trial and error. But errors can be hard to identify – especially as a writer starts to be pretty good at the basics. Once things start to go subtly wrong with a person’s work, it becomes obvious there’s no single right answer as to how to fix a given challenge within a manuscript.

Part of the answer, of course, is to find a group of peers with good reading skills and the same need to have outside eyes laid on their work. People with goodwill, a story in progress, and an understanding that half of critiquing is about helping the author fix their work and the other half is about cultivating your own critical sense so you can better address your own.

With short story critique groups, there’s a rhythm that can work quite well: new writers submit a story to a workshop, everyone critiques it, and then everyone goes home to hopefully rewrite the piece before sending it to market. When they return, it’s generally with another piece. There’s a fresh start. This is how Clarion and Odyssey and a number of other workshops are configured. (There’s an article in Wired about the SF workshops this week, by the way. I found it a bit shallow, and the comments thread may make you blind with rage, but some of the actual interview responses are interesting.)

With novel workshops, the logistics get much trickier. If you submit your first three chapters, and get a bunch of feedback, do you then revise those chapters? If you do, do you submit them again to make sure they’re working? If they’re not, do you revise and resubmit them again? That’s just an ornate way of never getting the book finished.

On the other hand, it can feel very weird to submit chapter one, get feedback, try then to use that feedback to write a better chapter two. (Next you submit that, and try to use the next round of feedback to inform chapters three and four.) This gets your novel done–and I am a huge fan of done! But drawback can be that if you are truly improving your craft as you go, the last chapters of the book may be significantly better-written than the opening ones. This leaves you to discover, four or five hundred pages later, whether you’re up to the task of revising. You are drafting better, which is great, but can you raise something you wrote six months ago to the level of what you’re creating now?

Additionally, the plunge-forward system doesn’t address any huge structural changes you decide to make along the way. When you turn the guy who was formerly the love interest into the main character’s brother, around about chapter five, the question arises again… do you go back and tweak this before moving forward?

Okay, so what if you got a dozen writers together and they all managed to submit a completed novel draft on the same day… make it November 30th. You could then set some kind of reading period–one book every two or three weeks–and trade off so that each participant was getting one critique during each round. But how to get a dozen writers to all finish their book on the same day? I chose November 30th because it’s the end of Nanowrimo, but most Nanowrimo projects would require considerable massaging before they were workshop-ready.

There are other logistical challenges with novel-in-progress workshops, but these are some of the things I’m mulling right now.

Has any of you been in a novel group that worked? How was it structured?